Public policy and legislation across the globe regulate and restrict technology in countless ways. Yet the laws of technology itself are few. And even among those, most are generally not well known.
Melvin Kranzberg, an American academic whose field was the history of technology, created just six laws of technology more than 35 years ago. The most essential of Kranzberg’s laws is the first one – technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.
The emergence in our time of enormously powerful computing technology has moved the concept or artificial intelligence out of science fiction and into commercial and cultural fact. Currently, AI is building a strong presence in the scholarly publishing industry, where there are now many new AI-related initiatives, products, and services.
Click below to listen to the latest episode of the Velocity of Content podcast.
These opportunities challenge us to consider the area of ethics as applied to AI uses within publishing.
On Thursday this week at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I will moderate a Frankfurt Studio panel discussion, AI Solutions – Trained With Your Content? Court decisions, regulation, and legislation will ultimately create the legal guardrails for protecting copyrighted content from unchecked infringement. In the meantime, debate over any limits to be placed on training LLMs must address concerns over equity, quality, transparency, and authenticity.
In 2019 at the STM Association’s Frankfurt Conference, I spoke with Carlo Scollo Lavizarri and Niels Peter Thomas about publishing industry-led initiatives under development even then to regulate AI and govern the use the technology to the benefit of scientific research.